SW2006 SP0.0 - General Concensus

I am interested in the general concensus of your thoughts about SW2006.
We have received all of our seats and I have been sitting on them for
a few weeks. Just based on past history with 0.0 releases I am
reluctant to install. However we are all eager to upgrade.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

It takes a brave soul to upgrade to SP0 of anything. It's difficult for me
to imagine productivity gains sufficient to make up for the inevitable
heartaches--which is why my company won't be going anywhere near it for at
least a couple SPs.

 

I haven't used 2006 for any projects yet because my customers to this
point have all been on 2005. There are a few assembly visualization
enhancements which I really want to be using. PDMWorks 2006 is a big
improvement, and I'm already using that. Photoworks has nice new
capabilities with the camera, which I have used for a few renderings.

Bugs are a dime a dozen even in the existing version, so a few new ones
may help alleviate boredom more than anything else. If you wait for
perfect software, you'll never move forward. The existing version is
not perfect.

Overall, though, most of the new features are pretty forgettable. There
doesn't seem to be an overall compelling reason to move. This is
probably good news, since with fewer changes it will hopefully take
fewer service packs to repair.

 

You probably should have one seat installed for evaluation purposes.
You can't expect others to catch all the problems you might run into.
For a low impact test try running models through 2006 that you find
have bugs in 2005 and see if they are fixed.

Also be checking 2006 for little things. For example in 2004 I use the
reload dialog to capture the full pathname using CTRL-C. Obviously the
majority of users didn't like this functionality so it was removed in
2005 and 2006. So I will have to write a macro to do what was
previously easy to do.